Reading Response # 2 - Wayne Outside the Western

In Garry Willis' introduction to his book "John Wayne's America," he describes Wayne as the iconization of America -- a man who through his persona came to stand for what we hope America means and what it means to "be a man." Emblematic of America and the rugged individualistic male permanently associated with the American frontier, Wayne went further than perhaps any other star in becoming an icon, not just a star or a type. Indeed, when Wayne first passed away, a Japanese obituary declared "Mr. America is Dead," which suggests that Wayne not only represented what Americans felt their country should mean, but how others perceived the United States. Although Willis discusses this iconicity as being mostly specific to the Western, suggesting that Wayne's other roles are more forgettable or unusual, I believe that Wayne is a perfect example of persona informing another genre by contradiction,as detailed in Andrew Britton's article "Stars and Genre."

My favorite Wayne film, and what I always associate him with is strangely, not a Western, but rather John Ford's love letter to Ireland, "The Quiet Man," which is more a hybridization of romantic comedy/romantic melodrama than anything else. However, when considering Willis' description of Wayne, it becomes clear that it is Wayne's iconic persona that allows this film to function so well. It is a case of, as Britton describes,"deploying one genre in order to resolve or soften tensions exacerbated by another . . . a different strategy for dealing with the same ideological tensions" (204). Though Wayne may not ride a horse in this film or wear a white hat, he is essentially still "the cowboy." He plays an American returning to his birthplace in Ireland, and ironically, in order to succeed, he doesn't need to assimilate to Irishness, but rather assert his Americanness, by proving his virile masculinity, as he drags his deserting wife across 2 miles of sheep field and finally gives her bullying brother the punch he deserves.

Thus, Wayne still functions within the film as the American cowboy, taming his personal "frontier" with his masculinity and asserting himself to allow him to take his rightful place as the dominant male. However, rather than needing to defeat Native Americans to protect the American frontier, he faces domestic issues of a more intimate nature that nevertheless, require the same iconic aspects of his personality to be successfully overcome. However, by placing him in a romantic comedy, it allows Wayne's brash masculinity, exacerbated in Westerns like "Red River" and "The Searchers," to be softened by his domestic goals. Thus, while the film still relies on his star persona, it places Wayne in a highly atypical genre allowing him to soften his extreme masculinity in a time when the postwar sensitive male dominated films. Thus, Wayne can still represent America, but changing genres allowed him to accomodate a social need for a slight softening of some of the tensions created by his persona.

1)How does Wayne's role in "The Searchers" fit into Willis' analysis of him? By playing a bigoted, hateful, and often frightening, man, how did Wayne not completely distort/destroy his persona? Was maintaining his look, walk, and talk enough to prevent ths film from disrupting Wayne's image?

2)How can stars that we come to love for playing "themselves" (i.e. Julia Roberts)successfully function as "embodiments of contradiction in their films"? Particularly, how does this work when a beloved star suddenly plays outside their genre/type?

3) Would "North by Northwest" have worked as well with Jimmy Stewart (the man who Hitchcock initially promised the role)? Or is there something specific to Cary Grant's masculinity that makes the film definitive in a way that Stewart's performance could not have achieved?